Former top generals decry fatal mistakes in Biden’s disastrous 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal order
‘The fundamental flaw was the timing … too slow and too late’
When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, one of the most pressing decisions facing him was what to do about his predecessor’s plan to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. As different as Biden was from former President Donald Trump, they both shared an intense desire to bring an end to the 20year war that had no end in sight and cost the lives of more than 2,400 American troops.
A month before the 2020 election, Trump tweeted, “We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE
Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!”
And one week after Trump lost, over the objections of his defense secretary who he fired, he desperately tried to order all the troops home before he left office in January.
“I was handed a piece of paper with the president’s signature on it which had two sentences,” retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 19. “One was withdraw forces from Somalia by the 15th of December and then withdraw all forces out of Afghanistan by the 15th of January,” just five days before Biden took office.
Milley confronted national security adviser Robert O’Brien at the White House, who, along with other national security staff, convinced Trump the complicated retrograde of the remaining 4,500 U.S. troops was logistically impossible and would result in a catastrophic disaster for which he would be blamed.
Only then did the lame-duck president relent and allow 2,500 U.S. troops to remain.
At the Pentagon, where the consensus favored keeping a small number of troops in Afghanistan, along with NATO partners and thousands of civilian contractors to prop up the Afghan government, there was a collective sigh of relief.
When Biden took office, he was faced with what to do about the February 2020 withdrawal deal the Trump administration had signed with the Taliban, which came to be known as the Doha agreement and which called for all U.S. forces to be out by May.
That would mean thousands of NATO troops and the 8,000 or so contractors would have to leave too.
“The NATO slogan at the time was in together, out together,” Milley said. “And the contractors aren’t going to stay unless there’s American military forces to protect them.”
The Taliban were ignoring almost all the conditions it had agreed to — reducing violence, establishing a ceasefire, negotiating a peace deal in good faith — and adhered to only one, not attacking U.S. and coalition troops as they packed up to leave.
“The Taliban benefited from the fact that we were striking them much less frequently and with much less force, particularly after we began some of the programmed drawdowns that were part of the Doha agreement,” retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the four-star commander of the U.S. Central Command, testified at the House hearing. “They began to become larger, bolder, and more aggressive.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. had already begun to lose the ability to understand the shifting momentum on the battlefield because of the agreed-on reduction of U.S. troop levels from 8,600 to 4,500 during Trump’s last year in office.